The world has gone off the deep end

This piece from National Review Online by Victor Davis Hanson argues that “the world, not America, has gone off the deep end — just as it did some 70 years ago when faced with similar choices between cheap rhetoric and real sacrifice.” Hanson finds echoes of 1930s appeasement everywhere, especially in Europe. There, “cranky elites, terrified of trouble, indict on the cheap the democratically elected Mr. Sharon, while the masses in the millions go to the street to protest a war against a monster like Saddam Hussein and pay fealty to the terrorist Arafat.” And “the militarily weak but spiritually strong leaders of Eastern Europe once more reveal themselves to be far more moral men and women than those in Germany and France — the historic duet that so often has either started or lost wars.” Hanson hopes (but stops short of predicting) that the memory of September 11 will give us the resolve to put an end to the madness, just as the memory of Pearl Harbor did.